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Nadeem F. ParachaNaya Daur |
The notion that the West has tried to impose Westernisation and secularism in Muslim regions in the past few decades is largely
The term ‘authentic’ has evolved from a Romantic ideal into marketing gimmicks and aesthetic trends. In many cases, both at home
Across history, political parties have had to learn to balance their incipient ideology with pragmatism in order to ensure mainst
'Donald Trump and the Rise of Christian Nationalists’ was the title of an essay published in August this year on the academic website The...
Last week, the veteran political analyst Najam Sethi claimed that the jailed Pakistani politician Imran Khan was utilising contents from the...
From the day Pakistan came into being, ideas formulated by ‘modernist’ scholars such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Allama Muhammad Iqbal have been...
Just days before this year’s US presidential election, when I was wrapping up my interviews with a cross-section of voters in some US states for a...
After his ouster from power in 2022, Imran Khan decided to roar back to power by operating from outside the country’s mainstream political paradigm....
On many occasions, it just takes a single incident to trigger riots. The incident can be actual, or overly exaggerated and, in some cases, entirely...
Studies show that incidents of civil unrest have been increasing across the world. Yet, there are also those who are of the view that the police are...
The military-establishment (ME) and the government have decided to call Imran Khan a ‘fitna’ [conspiratorial, divisive, violent]. To most other...
Last week, protests erupted in Umerkot, a city located at the edge of the Thar Desert in Sindh. The protests were held to condemn the extrajudicial...
In his 1945 book, Open Society and its Enemies, the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper described a paradox, which he called the “paradox of...
The British historian John Dalberg-Acton described stupidity as “a corruption of knowledge.” This may mean information or knowledge that has been...
Most storylines in myths, films, TV series and novels largely revolve around three characters: the hero, the villain and the victim. In 1968, the...
History is written by victors’ is a phrase often used by people. But most historians detest it. They see it as an impulsive outcome of...
The ‘angry young man’ (AYM) was a character-type first introduced by some British writers in the 1950s. In fact, it was the British media that...
Ever since 2014, politics in Pakistan has largely been about a battle of narratives. This is nothing new or something peculiar to Pakistan. But such...
From July 30, deadly riots erupted in Britain when three young girls were stabbed to death in a quiet seaside town of the country. Britain’s...
In his autobiography Mein Kampf [My Struggle], published nine years before he came to power, the German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler concluded that Jews...
According to the German professor of law Ulrich K. Preuss, there are four ‘ideal types’ of constitutions. Preuss’ study focuses on what nature...
Societies in multiple countries are suffering from one of the most serious illnesses that can badly damage democracy. That illness is polarisation. ...
Numerous books have been written on Islam in Pakistan. So, two years ago, I set out to write a book on the history of liberalism in Pakistan. It is...
In 2017, Pepsi aired a commercial in which the American model Kendall Jenner breaks away from a fashion shoot to join a protest rally. She is then...
The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) has a history of voting against parliamentary bills that look to enhance or safeguard women and minority rights. To...
Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore and the architect of the tiny country’s giant economy, first visited Pakistan in 1988....
In November 1979, around 600 armed men seized the Grand Mosque in Makkah. The group was led by Juhayman al-Otaybi, who wished to kick-start an...
Last week, when the Pakistan cricket team suffered two ‘humiliating’ defeats in this year’s T20 Cricket World Cup, a large number of angry fans...
According to the veteran political analyst Najam Sethi, last week’s controversial post on the social media platform X by the chief of the Pakistan...
Studies on populism witnessed a manifold increase when Donald Trump unexpectedly won the 2016 American presidential election. Initially, most of the...
There’s a consistent pattern with vlogs and podcasts on YouTube. The more they succeed in finding larger audiences, the more they become about the...
The Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP), Justice Qazi Faez Isa, often goes out of his way to not provide interpretations of constitutional texts....
In May 2023, a recorded phone call — allegedly between the mother-in-law of the former Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Umar Atta Bandial, and the...
The past is mostly an invention that the present uses to secure an illusion that keeps lies in power. To the British novelist George Orwell, “Those...
In 1989, the essay ‘The End of History’ by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama created quite a stir. He wrote that liberal democracy...
Currently, one of the most frequently used words in political discourses is the term ‘polarisation’. Recent studies demonstrate that a majority of...
Like politicians, political commentators, too, frequently use the word ‘awaam’ [the masses]. I once asked a political analyst what he meant by the...
The German writer J Wolfgang Goethe once quipped, “Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes.” As if to expand upon Goethe’s words, the...
Till the 1960s, the idea of engineering an ideal society was an earnest endeavour. It did not draw the kind of cynical ridicule or even dread that it...
In 1975, a conference on the history of Sindh was organised in Karachi. It was treated as an important event by the then prime minister of Pakistan,...
A lot has been theorised and analysed in the last decade about the rise of populism across the world. Political scientists and sociologists have put...
Recently, when hundreds of workers belonging to the Deobandi Sunni Islamist party, the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam–Fazal (JUI-F) — protesting against the...
In 1987, the American sociologists Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge formulated a ‘Religious Market Theory.’ The theory is a critique of the...
Back in the late 1980s, a bunch of guys and I started to publish a ‘revolutionary’ newsletter. We were all in our early twenties and some of us...
The so-called ‘emotional vote’ is something that, for almost a decade now, has been increasingly attracting the attention of political scientists....
Pakistan has been stuck in a ‘vicious cycle’ in which the military establishment (ME) constantly intervenes to aid the election of a prime...
In Pakistan, the moment someone mentions the word ‘rigging’, the first thing that comes to mind is the image of suspicious looking people stuffing...
In Pakistan, the moment someone mentions the word ‘rigging’, the first thing that comes to mind is the image of suspicious looking people stuffing...
On January 13, a three-member bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Qazi Faez Isa, delivered a verdict in favour of...
There are multiple theories on voting behaviour. The three most common are the rational choice theory, issue voting and the valence issue concept....